Bono’s firm still hasn’t found what it’s looking for

The nation’s No. 4 business magazine recently published a rip-roaring-read of a profile of Roger McNamee, the famed technology investor. Like almost every journalist who’s been around Silicon Valley, I’ve known Roger for years. I even wrote a profile of him myself about a decade ago, in the San Jose Mercury News‘s defunct Sunday magazine, West. I’d link to it if I could find it.

The article has good tension, pointing out that Elevation may have bitten off more than it can chew by acquiring large stakes in Forbes Media, publisher of another competitor to Fortune, and Palm (PALM), the ailing gadget maker. Considering that Elevation stressed it’d be primarily about entertainment, the article does a good job of addressing the young firm’s strategic drift.

Portfolio (there, I said it) gave Elevation a free pass, however, on perhaps its most curious investment, Move (MOVE), the real estate Web company formerly known as Homestore.com. While Forbes and Palm may yet turn out to be dogs, Move arguably already is in canine territory. I wrote in 2006 about how Move refused to die. Since then the company has moved a little closer to accomplishing the task. Elevation invested $100 million in November 2005, in preferred stock that converts at $4.20 per share and carries a 3 percent coupon. The stock trades for $2.30 today, putting Elevation seriously under water on its investment, and with the situation looking like its worsening, not improving.

Move, of course, has nothing to do with media or entertainment. Elevation’s stake currently is worth about $50 million. If the company doesn’t turn around, it most definitely will not be music to the ears of the investors Elevation Partners.

HP adds function to world’s most dysfunctional board

A underplayed release out of Hewlett Packard (HPQ) this morning deserves a little more attention than it’s getting. HP, fresh off another killer quarter, named two new directors, entrepreneur Joel Hyatt and John Joyce, a former CFO of IBM (IBM) and currently a partner at the tech buyout shop Silver Lake. (Inside baseball alert: Note that Silver Lake is quietly but significantly dropping the “Partners” from its name. More on that another time.)

It’s been less than a year since the spying scandal at HP revealed the machinations of one of the most ridiculously messed up boards in the Fortune 500. After some months of effort it’s clear that HP CEO Mark Hurd finally has done something about that. Hyatt is a CEO, so he joins Wachovia (WB) CEO and HP board member Ken Thompson in adding that level of experience. (As a former political candidate and business partner of Al Gore, he also brings a little Democratic juice to an historically Republican company.) Landing Joyce is a huge coup. Even though he’s been out of IBM for two years, he’s got to have great insight into how HP’s arch-competitor ticks.

The HP turnaround story, for all its drama, is really extraordinary. The stock traded midday Friday at around $45.50. It seems like only yesterday that HP traded for $23 a share. Okay, it was two years ago, and read this if you’d like to join me as I pat myself on the back for calling it.

Buyout biggie Silver Lake lowers its sights

While most buyout funds are getting bigger, Silver Lake Partners, one of the first heavyweight firms to focus exclusively on technology, is broadening its horizons – by looking at smaller deals. Silver Lake manages nearly $6 billion in two funds, with signature deals like Seagate (STX), Nasdaq (NDAQ) and still closely held SunGard. Soon it will debut a mid-market fund, Silver Lake Sumeru, whose goal is to invest in companies typically too small for Silver Lake to consider. The fund will be headed by Ajay Shah, whose Shah Capital Partners is moving itself en masse into Silver Lake’s new and expansive Menlo Park, Calif., offices. The new fund aims to collect about $750 million, and bringing on Shah is a way for Silver Lake to go after different kinds of companies without distracting its exsisting big-game hunters. (Silver Lake took its name from a run at Deer Valley, Utah, where the original partners were skiing when they sealed their deal. As far as I can make out, Sumeru is a Hindu and Buddhist concept of a mountain in the center of the world. Mid-mountain. Get it?)

Silver Lake has been well documented in its relatively short existence. A guy named Serwer chronicled the firm’s founding in a 1999 article called “The Deal of the Next Century,” before Silver Lake started investing. I followed that with a piece in 2003, when Silver Lake decided to plunge back into buying tech. Don’t assume, by the way, that Silver Lake is ignoring the high end of the tech buyout market. On the contrary. It is busy raising its third fund, said to weigh in at $7.5 billion. That’s peanuts compared to the $20-billion fund Goldman Sachs (GS) just raised, but large for a tech-only operation. The Silver Lake boys are all hush-hush, by the way, about all of this. Not all of their investors are. The Indiana Public Employees’ Retirement fund, for example, recently announced its $50-million investment in Silver Lake Partners III.